The Lost Labels

Filed by Jimmy — first grade. PHASE 2, WEEK 2. The brand-prophecy post: the label man’s first label inventory, lost.

In first grade, I walked to school—a kid-sized commute of a couple of blocks. Mom would walk me partway and then watch from the edge of our block while I covered the last stretch. She believed this constituted supervision, but I understood it to be a surveillance window with a known blind spot. The moment she turned back toward the house, I executed my procedure: an opposite turn away from school and toward the five-and-dime.

On one particular day, I was carrying Campbell’s soup labels. The school collected them—labels for points, points for equipment, or something like that—and I had a stack, which was now a liability. A kid window-shopping the five-and-dime with a fistful of soup labels is a kid with evidence of truancy. So I did what any operator with cache experience would do: I stashed the labels in a bush for later recovery, and off I went to conduct my unauthorized retail reconnaissance.

My mother met me coming out of the store. I want the record to reflect her detection rate across this entire archive: the woman missed nothing that mattered for longer than an afternoon.

But here’s the part that has genuinely never stopped bothering me: the labels were never recovered. I went back to that spot, more than once, and searched that bush like it owed me money. The labels were simply gone! My first label inventory, cached in an unsecured location, was lost forever to causes unknown.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I have since spent a rather significant portion of my adult life making labels, registering them, check summing them, and storing them where bushes cannot get them. I am not saying these facts are connected. I am saying I have never once lost a label since, and I know exactly which bush to blame.

Lesson logged: An unsecured cache is a donation with extra steps. If it matters, register it, store it properly, and know where it is—or accept that the bush owns it now.

More field reports declassified soon. —Jimmy